A Body of Work

by David Hallberg

  But in class the dancers surprised me. To get as much as a nod and a half smile is to get a lot from a Russian you do not know. In that sense, they were friendly. Obviously, they were not going to throw me a welcome party. Nor did they introduce themselves, which at ABT is standard. But it seemed that if I worked hard and well I could earn their respect.

  Yuri and I rehearsed Swan Lake, which I would be dancing with the company in St. Petersburg the following month. During the four days we worked together, I was once again pushed into realms previously unknown to me. A coach like Yuri is found once in a career, if ever. I learned that he has the highest regard for dancers who can push themselves, as opposed to those—like myself—who work best when someone else is cracking the whip. So I cracked my own whip in his presence, spurring myself on at every moment and without being told to go higher and faster, to dance more cleanly and precisely.

  The result was that he, in turn, took me even further. As always, I responded well to that incisive person in front of me, studying me, critiquing me, picking at me, motivating me. Yuri had become a major part of my career, unlocking a depth of understanding about how to execute steps and translate character using my entire being. He shed new light on roles I still struggled with.

  I was convinced that if I was ever to reach my full potential, I needed Yuri in the rehearsal room.

  * * *

  IN NEW YORK, another Russian had an equally strong impact on me. I had first worked with Alexei Ratmansky when he joined American Ballet Theatre as Artist in Residence in 2009. Over the years, I have been in the studio with many great creators. But none as quietly demanding as Alexei. His work has made him ballet’s most sought-after choreographer.

  Bringing him to the company was a coup for ABT and affirmation of Kevin’s ability to bring in a choreographer capable of amassing a significant body of new work for the company. It was not long before his initial contract, set to expire in 2014, was extended to 2023. His strong commitment to ABT sparked a significant wave of inspiration among the dancers of the company.

  Born in 1968, and trained at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy, Alexei spent his dancing career in a number of companies around the world, each one adhering to a particular training system and style. These diverse experiences outside of Russia allowed him to absorb many different methodologies of classical dance, which he augmented with an encyclopedic knowledge of its history and the utmost respect for its traditions. After his initial foray into choreography, he returned to the Bolshoi Ballet in 2004 to become its Artistic Director. He stayed five years, creating new works, invigorating the company with fresh energy, and building the roster with dancers he found to be the future of Russian ballet. He specifically nurtured two young dancers, who rose quickly within the ranks, thrilling audiences with their risk taking and raw power onstage: Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev.

  Alexei’s first and most passionate calling was to create. He felt the inner pull to get steps out of his mind and onto dancers. So he left the pressures and responsibilities of being a director and became a free agent, creating numerous works on every major dance company throughout the world. His arrangement with ABT allowed him to continue to work with other companies, a liberty he sought when he left Bolshoi. It was a win-win situation for Alexei, and his arrival instigated a journey of discovering new ways of interpreting movement together.

  Alexei has achieved an interesting balance between upholding traditions of classical ballet, utilizing them as essential tools to his creative process, while also pushing dancers beyond the standard limitations of the art, the usual ideas of what dance or movement should look like. When creating in the studio, Alexei begins with an idea, a series of movements. He explains them to us, demonstrating some of them himself, and then observes how we do them. He sees what is possible, what can successfully translate from his imagination to actual dancing. But also what cannot. He has very specific ideas about what something should look like. He is curious to know how the movement feels for the dancers and how it can evolve beyond a dry execution of steps. We are the blank canvas, using nothing but our abilities and our bodies to translate his ideas. He wants dancers with no ego, no affectation, no air about themselves. Because he exemplifies that humility and simplicity himself. It’s all about the work. The process. The evolution. The idea.

  What we dancers bring to Alexei is our own approach to dancing. Everyone has an individual movement style. Some are more refined, some more passionate and carnal. He uses those assets to push everyone beyond the way they think they can move. He sees more in the dancers than the dancers see in themselves.

  Working with him is an intense experience. During rehearsals, he starts us off with an eight-count of steps. We study it, attempt it, and almost immediately the onslaught of corrections starts. Some choreographers allow a grace period, letting us test out the movement and get it into our bodies before it is analyzed. Alexei gives us no such grace period. You can see the intricacies of the step rolling through his mind, almost faster than he can explain the concept. Certainly faster than we can pick up each and every nuance he corrects. We desperately try to keep up. Every move is scrutinized, questioned. He bombards us with a constant flow of new shadings. Soon I am in information overload, thinking of this small change, that small correction of the head or arm. Desperately trying to remember everything he said.

  In creating ballets like On the Dnieper and Seven Sonatas and, later, his Shostakovich Trilogy, he utilized my natural gifts—my height, my lightness, my lyricism—but altered my sense of weight distribution and added more heft to a sometimes fey movement quality. Without explicitly saying, “Make it heavier,” he corrected the movement with that in mind, in the process making me more Dionysian and less Apollonian.

  Working alone with Alexei in the studio is a meditative, quiet, determined process. The work is the absolute focal point. It’s not about Alexei choreographing and it’s not about me dancing. Instead, the axis is this third, overarching entity: the movement. We’re subsumed in the creative process, and when we communicate it’s as if we’re conversing with the movement and not with each other. He gives me steps. I work them out with my body. Then begins a heightened level of correspondence between the two of us, searching for the perfect way a step will translate from him to me.

  The time devoted to texturing the steps is paramount. Even revisiting a Ratmansky ballet I’ve danced before, I couldn’t simply have two or three rehearsals to brush up on the work. He always sees it anew, excited by the opportunity to make his preexisting ballet better, with deeper meaning and purpose. He will break me down to build me back up, solely focused on the role I’m portraying or the steps I’m dancing. Putting them under a microscope, dissecting them, then stepping back to see them whole once more. He is quick to notice missing details. The work is arduous but rewarding. He’s not one to quickly praise. But when he does give a compliment, you know he means it. Ballet after ballet, we built an honest professional rapport based on mutual respect and investment in the work at hand.

  * * *

  MY CREATIVE PROCESS with Alexei was food for the malnourished. He cast me in his creations, molding them to my body and artistic inclinations, and encouraged me to make them my own. Nothing compares to dancing work that is tailored specifically to you. This is why dancers from George Balanchine’s era at New York City Ballet attest to it being the golden age of creation. There was nothing like Mr. B. creating something with you specifically in mind, I would hear over and over. I understood that when works were created on me.

  * * *

  IN 2011, ABT was set to premiere The Bright Stream, a comic ballet Alexei had resurrected for the Bolshoi Ballet, complete with a cycling dog, dancing farmers, and a male dancer performing on pointe and in drag. Sadly, both despite and because of the comedic nature of the ballet, it had a tragic and tortured history. The original version of The Bright Stream was created in 1935, and was the work of three of Russia’s most gifted, ingenious talents: Fyodor Lopukhov, its choreog
rapher and librettist; his co-librettist Adrian Piotrovsky; and the brilliant composer Dmitri Shostakovich (also Alexei’s favorite). Theirs was a saucy ballet at a time when Russian ballets had little sauce, especially if they dealt with—or seemed to mock—the noble Russian peasant, a subject about which the nation’s tyrannical ruler, Joseph Stalin, was deadly serious. As a result of their perceived disrespect, Lopukhov fell out of favor and his creative career was effectively ended. Piotrovsky was sent to the gulag and was not seen again. As for Shostakovich, he never wrote another ballet score. His life after The Bright Stream, he said, was “gray and dull and it makes me sad to think about it.”

  In the wake of the vitriolic reception the ballet received in Moscow, the original choreography was never notated. Alexei resurrected it by working from what he called Lopukhov’s “brilliantly detailed” libretto. Given all that went before it, his staging of The Bright Stream was a political statement as well as a major artistic achievement. It clearly spoke to Alexei’s drive to resurrect works that were seemingly lost.

  The role I was to dance in The Bright Stream was the Ballet Dancer. Sent to the farm from Moscow to dance for the peasants, my character and several others decide to play a trick on an old couple in the town. The choreography requires the Ballet Dancer to put on a long white tutu of the type worn by women in Romantic-era ballets such as Les Sylphides. A Romantic tutu consists of a three-quarter-length bell-shaped skirt made of tulle. My outfit included a tightly fitted bodice, tulle shoulder bands, a coronet of flowers and pointe shoes.

  It was the tutu that gave me pause. The prospect of donning it, of dancing in it onstage in front of thousands of people, brought back a flood of scarring childhood memories, of all those youthful tormentors calling me a girl. The wounds were still there. True, I was no longer the outcast I once had been. I had found my world and was accepted by my colleagues; I fit into my community. But somehow, putting on a dress seemed to invalidate it all. I remembered the perfume being poured on me at school. I felt painfully vulnerable once again.

  I was by no means going to pull out of the ballet. So I needed to assure myself that Alexei wasn’t making me look effeminate. I knew it was time to set aside my childhood insecurities and focus on the artistic gain of collaborating once again with him. Tutu or no tutu, I was working with a man who inspired me creatively. And this trumped the memory of every bully from the past.

  During the rehearsal period, I had strengthened my feet enough to be able to stand on pointe, something male dancers never train to do. Standing on the tips of my toes, which were crammed into the pointe shoe’s narrow wooden box, was a completely new way of supporting my entire body. The flexibility in my feet was a blessing and a curse. Although the bend of my foot creates a harmonious line of the leg, it proved potentially dangerous when dancing on pointe. I could easily go over on the shoe and sprain a ligament in the ankle. But the right amount of incremental daily training allowed me to properly execute the choreography. Thankfully, given the ballet’s jocular nature, I didn’t need to look as lithe as a real ballerina. I could use my lack of comfort in my tutu and pointe shoes to comedic advantage.

  Still, I was apprehensive about the way the audience would react. My first entrance in drag was a fast run from one side of the stage to the other in a typical sylphlike pose, fingers and arms outstretched, leading the body forward. On opening night, I waited in the wings, and when my musical cue came, I bolted onstage and dashed noisily across it. As I ran, I waited to hear the response from the packed theater. They gasped in shock, stunned to see me in a costume worn only—until that moment—by my female partners. Then the audience roared with laughter. Alexei had taught me to simply present the movement and never sell it for laughs. The timing and simplicity of the gestures he’d given me were my saving grace. My childhood memories dissipated. This was about something bigger than that.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Bright Stream turned out to be a demarcation point. I had been dancing as a Principal with ABT for five years. The work was a continual and rewarding challenge. Though very early on in my career I had felt the need to look beyond my immediate surroundings for inspiration, after the Jérôme Bel collaboration failed, my focus on ABT had become absolute. The consistent opportunities to work with artists like Osipova and Ratmansky, among many others, gave me ongoing nourishment and responsibility that kept me from becoming bored or complacent. The pace was at times more difficult and more intense than I could handle, but this strengthened me. There were always new horizons to conquer, with new partners and new styles of movement and interpretation. There was barely a moment to come up for air. I felt supported and nurtured by everyone around me. I trusted the decisions of the artistic staff as to when I was ready to tackle a role or deemed a good enough partner to dance with a specific ballerina. When the time came for a new role I just took it on, did my best, and moved forward, learning from the lows and rejoicing in those moments and performances when everything flowed and I was able, at times, to satisfy even myself.

  In those years, I had found a life that fit, including friends and the pleasures of a successful career. But that life was not what I really wanted. Or at least not all I wanted. I needed to keep testing myself, to do what frightened me, to dare, to find new ventures, to overcome my fears and reservations, to expand my work, my life, myself.

  Once again, I began craving something new and uncharted. The unknown. The risky. A new artistic focal point. Something I had, perhaps, never yet dreamed of nor experienced. A new purpose of discovery that would shake me, once again, to the core of my being. Just like my move to Paris had done. Just like ABT had done. My mind began to burn at the idea. I have always had that longing for more. More to dance. More to read. More to listen to. And above all: more to discover artistically. The potential of dance has always seemed limitless. But what is not without limits is the time in which to do it.

  * * *

  NATURALLY I BEGAN having fewer debuts in the full-length classics, as there are only a limited number of them in the ABT repertoire. But instead of diving further into my character development and finding richer interpretations, I started to lose the drive that propelled me into the big ballets in the first place.

  I would go to class every day, which always motivated me. But in rehearsal for a role I had already danced, I’d constantly look at the clock. I spent more time scheduling after-work activities than I spent thinking about my own artistic contribution to the work I was given. At times I ached to be anywhere but the rehearsal studio. I would rather have been out exploring the city, or at home, or having a coffee with some friends.

  I hated that about myself.

  And I knew that the problem wasn’t anything happening, or not happening, at ABT. The problem was me and the restlessness I couldn’t help but feel and couldn’t contain.

  * * *

  WHEN REHEARSALS BEGAN for the 2011 Met season, I struggled to find the deep-seated motivation I knew I had in me but which was somehow maddeningly inaccessible. I felt embarrassed by the idea that I wasn’t pushing myself to better my own dancing. I had tasted the fruits of that labor and benefited from its focus, but now I had lost the hunger that I relied on to drive me. It wasn’t that the challenges posed by the classical ballets, technically and artistically, ever waned. What waned was my interest in digging ever deeper for meaning, for reinvention, for a richer texture of the work that I already knew.

  Natalia Makarova came to rehearse her production of La Bayadère just as the season opened at the Met. She is the legendary former ballerina who danced with the Kirov and then made a home with ABT after her defection. Like Natalia Osipova, she is known to her colleagues as Natasha. Small and delicate, with a swanlike neck, she is tough and exacting in the studio, never shying away from voicing her opinion. After a dress rehearsal in which I danced the lead role of Solor, she came to me as the stage crew busily changed sets and lights around us. She looked deeply into my eyes.

  “What happened?” she asked.
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  “What do you mean?”

  “There is no life in your interpretation. No true belief. It was so much better the last time you did it. Are you not inspired? You need to find more meaning before tomorrow’s performance.”

  I stood there speechless, still sweating in my costume and towering over her petite frame. Physically I dominated her, but her blunt honesty whittled me to the size of a child. She spoke the truth. And I had to hear it. My lack of inspiration showed, and I was caught in the act. I knew something needed to change. I had coasted too long, looking for others to inspire me without looking within myself. No one was going to motivate me but me.

  CHAPTER 20

  American Ballet Theatre was to perform at Bolshoi Theatre in March of 2011. It was a major event for ABT, for we were returning to Moscow after a twenty-year absence. We chose a very strong collection of repertoire. Theme and Variations showcased the dancers in a fresh, original Balanchine light and was a staple we toured the world over, given that it was essentially “ours” (having been created for the company in 1947). It was danced to the final movement of Tchaikovsky’s Suite No. 3 for Orchestra, which seemed an appropriate musical offering to the theater that had debuted Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

  The link between Bolshoi Theatre and ABT was Alexei Ratmansky, who had become ABT’s Artist in Residence shortly after he vacated his post as Bolshoi’s Artistic Director. We would also present works he created specifically for ABT to the Moscow audience, which was very familiar with Ratmansky’s canon of ballets for the Bolshoi. They knew and respected him, referring to him as “our own.”

  * * *

  MY FIRST EVENING in Moscow, jet-lagged and semidelirious, I raced to Bolshoi Theatre to see Alexei’s restaging of Flames of Paris. I settled into my seat and watched Natasha Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev lead the company in this two-act ballet about the French Revolution. I had seen them dance it once before; this time was different. The evening changed my entire outlook. I was stunned by what I saw on the stage. It was a new Bolshoi. The company danced with vibrant life. The flair and fire Bolshoi was so well known for had been reignited. Gone were the dust, the overacting, the archaic gestures for which the company was sometimes criticized. That show redefined everything I thought of the Bolshoi and, beyond that, about the purpose of ballet and how much vitality still abides within this art form. I sometimes think, What if I hadn’t gone to see Flames the night I arrived in Moscow and walked away inspired? What if I hadn’t been so impressed by a new generation of Bolshoi dancers?